The summit of leaders of the G20 group of advanced and emerging countries in Cannes last week (3-4 November) failed to come up with any solution to the eurozone’s sovereign-debt crisis.

Six weeks before, leaders of eurozone member states started to talk about the ‘make-or-break’ European Council and eurozone summit in Brussels on 17-18 October (later, in a sign of the growing chaos, it was put back to 23 October and had 26 October tagged onto it). Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, and Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, identified this global gathering as the deadline by which everything would be fixed. It was anything but. Indeed, the sporadically acrimonious G20 summit made things worse.

Greek deal

It all started to go wrong in the days leading up to the summit as markets balked at the lack of detail concerning the eurozone deal for Greece agreed in late October.

Then George Papandreou, Greece’s prime minister, shocked the rest of the eurozone – including his own finance minister – by calling a referendum on it. Papandreou was summoned to Cannes, and held talks with Sarkozy, Merkel and others on Wednesday night (2 November), the day before the G20 proper began.

The eurozone’s woes dominated the talks. Longer-term issues of the kind that the G20 is designed to resolve – such as how to reduce volatility on international commodity markets – were completely overshadowed.

Taboos were broken at this summit as the previously unthinkable was voiced openly. Sarkozy, Merkel and José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, for the first time openly raised the possibility that Greece could leave the eurozone; and Italy – the world’s eighth-largest economy – agreed that officials from the International Monetary Fund could monitor its attempts to implement economic reforms.

Rarely have Europe’s leaders looked as rattled as they did at times during this summit.

“If the euro explodes, so will Europe,” Sarkozy said on 3 November. This summit has done to little to suggest that anyone can agree on how to stop that happening.